A Homily for the First Sunday of Advent
Readings: Isaiah 2:1-5  Romans 13:11-14  Matthew 24:37-44  

The problem with knowing when is forgetting to be ready now. Our Lord told us that even he did not know the hour when all would be revealed, the apocalypse, from the Greek apo = “un” and kaluptein = “to cover” (Mt 24:36). But that has not stopped Christians from trying to know when the end is near.

On the other hand, our Lord did tell us—repeatedly—that the kingdom of God is at hand (Mt 3:2; Mt 4:17; Mk 1:15). So the problem with excessive focus on what is still to come can be our inattention to what already is: the kingdom of God in our midst.

Take, for example, the farmer and lay Baptist preacher from New York State, William Miller. Like other would-be exegetes before him, he converted the prophet Daniel’s 2,300 days into years. “For two thousand three hundred evenings and mornings; then the sanctuary shall be set right” (Dn 8:14). Miller then set the apocalyptic alarm clock running in 457 B.C., when the Persian King Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to their homeland. So he could confidently announce in 1832 that calendars would not be needed after 1843.

Dorian Lynskey retrieves Miller’s words of warning in Everything We Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (2024):

Finding all the signs of the times and the present condition of the world, to compare harmoniously with the prophetic descriptions of the last days, I was compelled to believe that the world had reached the limits of the period allotted for its continuance.

There are always those who are ready to listen to insider apocalypticism, and Lynskey offers a convincing reason why that is: 

[E]ven if we are not religious, we like to think that our own is a unique and crucial turning point…. We seem to be built to imagine that we live, if not at the end of the world, then at least at the end of an era. We love to talk about the death of this and the fall of that, and to boast that we are there to witness it. We do like to feel special…. In this way we attempt to take the mess and mystery of the future, which has always been frightening because it is the ultimate unknown, and tidy it into a story.

William Miller’s followers swelled to around 50,000. They were particularly prominent in New England and western New York. And the financial panic of 1837 only heightened worries that God was on the move. 

According to the historian Whitney R. Cross, who first extensively studied the “enthusiasms” of 19th-century American Protestantism: 

the whole of American Protestantism came so very close to the same beliefs…. All Protestants expected some grand event about 1843, and no critic from the orthodox side took any serious issue on basic principles with Miller’s calculations.

Lynskey retrieves the growing enthusiasm for the end that Miller set in motion:

Many Millerites quit their jobs, abandoned their businesses and sold all their worldly possessions. One put up a sign: “This shop is closed in honor of the King of Kings who will appear about the 20th of October. Get ready, friends, to crown him Lord of all.” On the day that became known as the Great Disappointment, recalled one broken Millerite, “Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before. It seemed that the loss of all earthly friends could have been no comparison. We wept and wept till the day dawned.”

The end did not come, but forecasting “the end times” was far from over. 

A teenage Millerite called Ellen Harmon went on to found the Seventh-Day Adventists in 1863. End time prophecies were also central to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons) and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose founder, Charles Tazze Russell, claimed that the Second Coming had begun, invisibly on 1 October 1914.

Again, the problem with knowing when is that we can forget to be ready now. Indeed, excessive attention to the apocalypse can be a power play, unworthy of a disciple. Are those supposedly in the know seeking an advantage over those caught unawares? 

Our faith has always recognized three comings of the Lord. All three are certain, though the time of two is unknown. We do not know when history will end. No one does. We also do not know when we will die. Though everyone will. 

It is the time of the third advent that is certain. The Lord has already come into our midst, setting in motion the kingdom of God. He is within our lives now. Indeed, since the coming of Christ, there is a new and essential criterion for what makes a life well lived: Are we, in each moment of existence, opening ourselves to the enigma from which we emerge and to which we shall return, the mystery that once stood among us and said, 

So too, you also must be prepared,

for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come (Mt 24:44)?

Apocalypticism is a power play, premised upon an unknown future. But true discipleship is always a surrender, a yielding to the Lord of the Day and what he asks of us. We can attempt to predict the course of history; we can sometimes delay death; but the Gospel assures us that we have already been summoned into the day of the Lord.

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.